Maybe we call it “content” because we have nothing worth saying.
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Have you ever pondered why the hell we use the word CONTENT to describe the basic marketing materials we send out from all sorts of media? After all, the definition of content (n.) “that which is contained,” serves little indication of what it actually is, or should be. To answer the question, Dave Trott wrote up an excellent thought exercise in which he challenged his colleagues to define the word “content.” Failing to find one who could answer, Trot settles on labeling it simply that: “Just stuff. The stuff that goes into the space that’s there to be filled.”
We can probably think of lots of those spaces that need filling. We have our three Facebook posts a day, at least fifteen Tweets, and the myriad of other laborious timelines to hit at the appropriate times. What was originally thought to be a form of outreach, to take an idea and target it to an audience, has now become a parcel service. Trott says, “We’re in the shipping business. That’s what happened to what we used to call “the idea”. The idea has become whatever goes into the box: just content. It could be anything, it’s not important.”
In Trott’s opinion, somewhere along the line the marketing universe stopped caring about the rich ideas behind the persuasion pieces and instead started idolizing the vehicles they came in. Trott again, “it was [originally] idea first, delivery system second. But by relegating the idea to content, it becomes far less important. The delivery system must now come before the idea, before the “content”. So changing the word signifies the complete change in the business.”
From my experiences, he’s mostly right. For every one argument you have over the nature of the ideas behind your “content” your have 15 demeaning directives from your supervisor saying, “I don’t care, that’s fine. Just put something out there.” The idea never had a chance.
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . .”
But I’ve got a different theory. Henry David Thoreau cleverly articulated something in 1854 that I feel we may have glossed over in our casual move to media-oriented information. You see, somewhere between the book and the Snapchat, we forgot that technology doesn’t simply make “content” faster or more efficient; it completely changes it.
Neil Postman argues in Amusing Ourselves to Death that Thoreau was in fact, “precisely correct. He grasped that the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different from what typographic men were accustomed to.”
To understand what Postman is getting at, you have to return to the 19th century, an era where spare time was spent reading Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, and school was never further away than down the street. Your life would have been the farm, your family, and your prose. The way we understand “content” now didn’t even exist back then.
Postman continues: “The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.” The intimacy between content (whether it’s a tweet, a share, a snap, etc) and the telegraph cannot be understated because the telegraph marked the birth of instantaneous, irrelevant media.
Taking a step back, we can see a battle unfolding in our professional lives between those who believe that social media is cheapening ideas and those who think we are merely drawing closer to our audience and arming our ideas with “relatability.” But what if this fight is a superficial one, a shadow of the original war that occurred before social media, and even television.
What if the reason our “content” often feels so empty isn’t that we are lacking creativity but, rather, that there was no substance to deliver in the first place? Or at least nothing anyone wanted to see.
Postman uses an “information-action ratio” to measure what we really do with the information we are provided: “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, & the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
If you can take no tangible action on the information you are given, then “the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” And doing nothing is precisely what we do with all the content we absorb on a daily basis. Or worse, the content we send out…
“Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.”
Don’t get me wrong, the intention of a group like the American Heart Association to stop people from having heart attacks is a noble pursuit. But is it degraded by Television, Facebook, Twitter, etc? Medium affects message; the packaging of content reinterprets the content. Lobbying in Congress for more funding, personal conversations with cardiologists, or periodicals for patients with heart defects; these are all effective media for conveying heart health content. Blog posts, tweets, snaps, commercials; these only interrupt our ingestion of entertainment.
Is not the most effective medium a doctor saying to a patient the content: “you need to start eating better.” But have you ever known someone with high blood pressure to correct their lifestyle from a tweet? A tweet is just one more piece of nonsense in a long timeline of cats.
I highly encourage reading Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, if, for nothing else, to drive home his two core points: the medium of discourse completely changes the message; and some forms of media are better suited for educating and others for entertainment; there can be no impactful mixture of the two.
It seems that the word “content” is actually very well suited to its role after all. As we all descend to lower, quicker forms of information, we find ourselves worshipping the efficiency, losing the substance, and finding less relevance to our daily action. Instead, we are amused by presidential candidates, we laugh at fast-food chain commercials, and demand more and more stimuli to compete with the ever-growing gestalt of visual stimuli that make up our connected world.
The only question is, when will the parcel service finally be free of content?
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